What is Pseudoscience?

How science differs from astrology and other pseudosciences

During my first term of full-time teaching in 1977, I used astrology as a case study in my course in the philosophy of science. The goal was to guide the students through the differences between sciences and pseudosciences, which are fields that claim to be scientific but aren’t. It was easy to show that standard ways of demarcating science such as falsifiability and verifiability don’t work, but I was embarrassed to approach the end of the term without providing the students with an alternative.

So after the term was over, I came up with my own definition:

A theory or discipline that purports to be scientific is pseudoscientific if and only if:

1. It has been less progressive than alternative theories over a long period of time, and faces many unsolved problems; but

2. The community of practitioners makes little attempt to develop the theory towards solutions of the problems, shows no concern for attempts to evaluate the theory in relation to others, and is selective in considering confirmations and disconfirmations

This definition was published in my 1978 article, “Why Astrology is a Pseudoscience”, which has been frequently reprinted in textbooks.

I later realized, however, that it was more informative to provide a list of typical features of pseudoscience rather than a strict definition, and hence provided profiles of science and pseudoscience in my 1988 book, Computational Philosophy of Science. Most recently, I was asked to write an introduction to the philosophy of science for a science education audience, so in this article updated the profiles to include the following differences:

5. Science progresses over time by developing new theories that explain newly discovered facts, whereas pseudoscience is stagnant in doctrine and applications.

The major addition over my earlier accounts is the first claim that science uses mechanisms whereas pseudoscience ignores them. A mechanism is a system of parts whose interactions produce regular changes, as in a bicycle which has pedals, a chain, and wheels that move it forward. Sciences like biology have an abundance of mechanisms, for example the operations of cells that produce life. In contrast, pseudosciences like astrology are mechanism-free, as no one has a clue how the configuration of the stars at a person’s birth could affect personality. Moreover, astrology is not based on statistical correlations, but rather on vague notions of resemblance such as that the red planet Mars is associated with being warlike. Astrologers don’t evaluate their theories in comparison to alternative theories of personality such as genetics and social learning.

So why does astrology remain popular? I think the best answer is motivated inference: astrologists generally tell people things that they want to hear. I pointed out in my 1978 article that astrology would have fewer enthusiasts if horoscopes tended less toward compliments and pleasant predictions and more toward the kind of analysis that Mother Jones magazine applied to people born under the sign of VIRGO: You are the logical type and hate disorder. This nit-picking is sickening to your friends. You are cold and unemotional and sometimes fall asleep while making love. Virgos make good bus drivers.

5. Science progresses over time by developing new theories that explain newly discovered facts, whereas pseudoscience is stagnant in doctrine and applications.

Psychiatry has been stuck with its chemical imbalance chimera for more than 60 years rebuffing all evidence that refutes it. Since the chimera was introduced, it has been defended with the mantra that "advances in the next 10 years will vindicate it" We are still waiting.

That many people, although truth to be told not all people note even all psychiatrists, call science.

There is a big difference between astrology and psychiatry though. While nobody takes astrology seriously, certainly the legal system doesn't, psychiatry enjoys undue power and influence to ruin people's lives. Because of that, psychiatry is way, way, way more dangerous than any other pseudoscience I can think of.

Psychiatry is probably one of the most intellectually dishonest endeavors around. I am not naive so I don't think we will see it disbanded any time soon, but I think that a lot can be done to limit psychiatry's ability to do damage.

Psychiatry like every science, unfortunately, includes some intellectually dishonest cases. But again, you don't dismiss a whole science for those few pseudo scientific approaches. You fix them, instead. Those psychiatric approaches that use the scientific method are scientific by definition, you like it or not. And I think that most involved with the anti-psychiatric movement, are just deluded people that can't get over the fact that there's nothing like a soul and the brain is a chemical machine. Speaking of bad science.

Other that, psychiatry is a science because you say so. It sounds strikingly familiar to what astrologers say.

When the record of psychiatry is compared to that of true sciences, psychiatry shows its true colors. It has provided electroshock therapy, lobotomy, psychotropic drugs all based on a chimera and none of which has fixed or cured anything. During the XX-th century, true science and medicine has produced miracles (think cancer science or hiv/aids science). Psychiatry has produced only misery.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, the discussion of whether the mind is caused by brain chemistry is irrelevant about the argument of whether psychiatry is a quackery http://endpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2012/05/psychiatry-doesnt-understand-difference.html .

Psychiatry has a record: it has made of kinds of wonderful claims about its quackery treatments. Each and every single falsifiable claim that psychiatry has produced has been falsified. Psychiatry has been convincingly shown to be a pseudoscience.

I have a PhD degree in a hard scientific field from one of America's top research universities. The type of bullshit produced by psychiatry is called scientific misconduct in my field.

"It refers to a field of medicine focused specifically on the mind, aiming to study, prevent, and treat mental disorders in humans."

"Those who specialize in psychiatry are different than most other mental health professionals and physicians in that they must be familiar with both the social and biological sciences."

"While the medical specialty of psychiatry utilizes research in the field of neuroscience, psychology, medicine, biology, biochemistry, and pharmacology,[73] it has generally been considered a middle ground between neurology and psychology."

"Psychiatrists also differ from psychologists in that they are physicians and the entirety of their post-graduate training is revolved around the field of medicine.[75] Psychiatrists can therefore counsel patients, prescribe medication, order laboratory tests, order neuroimaging, and conduct physical examinations."

If you think that repeating some bullshit written in wikipedia by some psychiatrist will strengthen your arguments you are mistaken.

For a discipline to be a science, it has to provides things such as falsifiability and prediction power. No matter how you spin or stretch psychiatry's record, the truth of the matter is that psychiatry DOES NOT pass the minimum tests required by a discipline to be considered science. A different question is why it has any credibility whatsoever. Some health care plans in the US also cover homeopathy and acupuncture. In that sense, psychiatry is not the only pseudoscience that is given credibility. What differentiates psychiatry from these other pseudoscientific endeavors is its ability to do damage: forced lobotomy (God thanks a think of the past in most of the world), forced ECT (still legal in many places), forced drugging (still legal) and deprivation of liberty (this happens everywhere).

I practice hard science and I can tell you that in my field the quackery called psychiatry would not be given any kind of thought.

For the majority of its history, psychiatry was able to live in the following equilibrium: abusing enough people so that psychiatry was relevant but not enough so that it could infuriate enough people to expose its quackery. All that began to change in the second half of the XX-th century and reached critical mass when psychiatrists got greedy trying to label everybody "mentally ill" so that their buddies in Big Pharma could make humongous profits. The scandal of DSM 5 is the culmination of psychiatry's intrinsic corruption. Now that it has been exposed, there is no way back.

Psychiatry belongs to the same realm as astrology, homeopathy and acupuncture: pseudoscience.

Psychiatry = Medicine (that specializes in the chemistry brain). As such provides hypotheses that are falsifiable, because it does use the scientific method and its theories can and are put to the test and are reproduced by detached groups of scientist in all circles of sciences.

And there are no souls.
So don't even try to sneak your religious agenda around here.

You can repeat your mantra "psychiatry is science" as many times as you want but it will not be more true. It's a plain lie. Period. You are sounding very dogmatic and zealot here, way more than those religious zealots you seem to despise.

The general idea behind biological psychiatry is not falsifiable and all the minor falsifiable claims produced by psychiatry, such as the serotonin hypothesis of depression, have been indeed falsified. Psychiatry has no prediction power whatsoever,

In words of Harvard's former provost Steven Hyman: http://endpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2012/05/there-is-no-conspiracy.html

"“We have no equivalent of a blood-pressure cuff or blood test or brain scan that is diagnostic,”"
“The DSM has given us reliability, meaning that—armed with the DSM criteria—two different observers should arrive at the same diagnosis in the same person,” says Hyman. “But it has not given us validity.” T

The latest edition of psychiatry's best known work of fiction, the DSM, doesn't even provide that reliability, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-frances/dsm-5-reliability-tests_b_1490857.html .

Bringing religion here is a red herring. I am a true scientist. The fiction promoted by psychiatry does not qualify as science in my field, period.

You said "serotonin hypothesis of depression, have been indeed falsified". Only if a discipline is a science its hypotheses are falsifiable and can be falsified. Once again, we don't dismiss a whole science because of its errors. It's a discipline's errors what basically make it a science in the first place, because sciences are self-correcting disciplines that build their knowledge upon new discoveries. Psychiatry has a bright future as a well deserved branch of medicine. We don't need to dismiss it completely. Just fix its faults. And get rid of the religious zealots that are trying to sneak their own religious agenda of a soul!

That psychiatry has not provided a single valid theory for any mental disorder, NONE. So, after hundreds of years selling smoke, I think it's time to call this scam for what it is. As I said in my post "not even wrong", psychiatry's main claims through its history have been no more valid than saying that telekinetic activity of unicorns living on Pluto cause mental disorders in humans living on Earth. Psychiatry is a scam, and I only need to point to its record. It belongs to the same realm as astrology or homeopathy.

From what I stand, and from what I have read about you, it's the zealots with your religious fervor in favor of unproven chimeras like astrology or psychiatry who are the real problem. Some guy wearing a white coat tells you he practices science and you believe him, regardless of the garbage he/she practices.

Approaches with Psychotropics
In the lucrative business called Psychiatry
Any and all so called
"Silverbullet" approaches
Should be used "ONLY" on werewolves/Lycans
At the very least
The werewolves' suffering would cease immediately

sadly enough :(
For the sake of humanity
It would be better for Psychiatry & Lycans
to co-exist in the SAME realm of mythology

A worry with this set of criteria is that many pseudosciences do seem to offer mechanisms, use statistical methods to find patterns, etc. - but they do so in a pseudoscientific way. Much of alternative medicine, for example, is based on vitalistic theories about energy flows (e.g., qi flowing through meridians in acupuncture). This provides a mechanistic explanation of sorts, but the mechanism in question is wholly fictional. Similarly, homeopaths cite abundant correlational evidence ("it works!"), and occasional clinical trials, in support of their claims. The problem here is that their statistics are bad; they confuse placebo effects for effects of their medicine, etc. The alt-med literature is also rife with critiques of conventional medicine (alternative theories), and simple theories are often offered to explain all illnesses - which allows for "cure-all" remedies.

My concern is that, by your set of criteria, it seems that the most we could say about these viewpoints is that they are *bad* science, not that they are pseudoscience. (Unless the last criterion, progressiveness, is allowed to do all the work in these cases?)

Nobody believes that Astrology is a real science. Science certainly doesn't, and that's what matters. So why bother? It's more like some sort of creative art mixed with mythology, or something of the like. But it's simple to know why. Astrology doesn't use the Scientific Method to reach its conclusions. Period. It doesn't have falsifiable hypotheses, it doesn't put them to the test in practice, it doesn't give them to detached groups of scientists to test their predictability. It's not that Astrology is a pseudo science. Astrology is nothing like a science. In fact it wishes it were a pseudo science, at least.

The vast majority of human learning and advancement has happened in many thousands of years previous to the current age where we have now coined the word "science". The only reason current academic scientific institutions created this new "scientific" worldview in which pseudosciences could be called out by them is simply in whether or not they use the word "science" in their discussions.

Astrology doesn't claim to be a science but it is insulting to justify its existence as "pseudo". Contemporary astrologers follow astronomy far more than the other way around, because advances in knowing the cosmos lead to advances in interpreting how that affects us here. Interpreting earth events according to celestial events is ancient, but it is not measurable (only the astronomy part of it is, on which astrology places itself) but rather descriptive and interpretive. It is not then "pseudo" but rather an art that springs out of science.

Getting one's chart read is a fascinating look simply at where the solar system's planets are. It is a snapshot, and like any other moment in the changing sky is simply a poetic way of using science as something that can connect us to ancient stories and poetic lore. Nobody's arguing that part of it is scientific, it is pure interpretation, the only thing any real astrologer cares about is getting the dates and planets right and then becoming an artist in interpretation after that. That's the only part skeptics ever look at, and its the least verifiable part of the process. It's like calling art criticism "pseudoscience".